


Collateral Damage

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 15:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4631205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Planning the Empire's war crimes is a dreadfully boring work, and having an arrogant, clumsy admiral in charge doesn't make anything better, except for one thing: making an impatient general sympathise with a long-suffering captain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collateral Damage

General Veers glanced down from the holo tactical display, flipping a few pages on his datapad and casually tugging up his left sleeve at the wrist, just enough to uncover the chrono. The hour it read made him lock his jaw and breathe deeply through his nose, to suppress all traces of a groan.

Not that Admiral Ozzel, Captain Piett, or any other officer who sat at the table, took any notice or would have, for different reason: the admiral, because he was the one doing all the talking; the others, because they were as near to coma as Veers was. Maybe. Staff meetings where the navy’s the host are foreign soil—not as bad as enemy soil, but foreign all the same.

“…the _Avenger_ and the _Devastator_ will detach from the main formation, following a Theta pattern to sector ninety-eight—” Ozzel leaned over the display to glare at the tiny triangles flying in close formation towards the target skyhook, then focused the fierce look on Piett. “ _Avenger_ and _Devastator_ I said, Captain.”

The captain had been busy writing something down on his datapad. He blinked once, his face showing no surprise, no confusion, nothing at all except for the dark circles around the eyes. In the bright light of the holoprojector that hit him from below, Veers could also see a caf stain on his upper lip.

“Yes, sir.” Piett’s quiet voice was as inexpressive as his face. In a quick string of typing and swiping on the touch-screen terminal, two triangles lit up in green and moved away from the formation.

Ozzel’s glower did not leave him. “Are your status reports so distracting, or is that a picture of your girlfriend you’re looking at?”

The other officers put up a very convincing show of examining the tactical readings with the greatest downcast-eyed care. No one gave away even a tiny sign of shock at the admiral’s language, let alone the captain.

“I apologise, sir,” said Piett. “It won’t happen again.”

 _Spineless cold fish_ , huffed a side of Veers’ brain. _But he has no choice._ He almost cringed as Ozzel inclined his head to look him in the eyes and shrugged, his mug relaxing in an expression of resigned complicity: _you know how these daft lower-ranking officers are, General, but what can we do!_

Complicity with someone who makes it a hobby to bully his subordinates… Veers shifted on his chair, and decided his datapad was suddenly very interesting. It was the last page of his report, that had left three quarters of sheet empty. He tapped the stylus on the blank page, wrote down _ISD Av. + Dev. move out of main fleet_.

“As I was saying,” Ozzel resumed, “the rest of the fleet will commence preliminary bombing at 5:15…” And so on. The holo display followed the admiral’s every word, illustrating what Veers in his dirt-bound humble opinion judged a reckless, life-throwing strategy—but the lives belonged to the doomed buggers on the skyhook and the planet. Intel said only certain political factions of theirs were known to have aided the local Rebel cell. Tough luck. As long as the wasted lives didn’t belong to the infantry, Veers saw no point in intervening. It wasn’t his job to manoeuvre a starfleet. And he wasn’t taking the exhausting trouble to lock horns again with Ozzel over a few thousand’s worth of collateral damage.

As a matter of fact, he just wanted to recite the content of his report and scram. But the admiral kept talking, more Star Destroyers went green and broke formation, a few officers asked bland questions that didn’t even chink the paint on the wider problems, Veers shook his legs under the table to keep the blood circulating. One question and lengthy answer by another, the map of the battlefield turned into a tangle of vectors that seemed to account for every attack route bar the shortest and straightest, swarms of red dots marking fighter squadrons, ships scattered so far and wide that the fleet didn’t seem worthy of the name anymore. The _Executor_ found herself floating under the planet’s southern pole.

“…by opening fire with all the main batteries at full power, the ice cap is expected to melt significantly after…” Ozzel waited, and frowned. “Captain, if you please?”

By now, Piett had acquired two more datapads lying in front of him; his right hand scribbled on one, his left typed into the tactical computer terminal. Non-Humans aside, Veers had seen only one kind of sentients accomplish that feat so far: Imperial officers who took the high standards of competence seriously. He felt a fleeting surge of comradely pride.

Ozzel clearly didn’t share the feeling. His mouth gave a twitch that shook the whole moustache and the tip of his nose. It reminded Veers of a holodrama about the Clone Wars he’d taken his then-girlfriend to watch, half a lifetime ago; this was the trademark grimace of the actor who played Count Dooku.

“Captain,” snapped the admiral, “enough damned crosswords!”

Piett’s tired eyes locked onto his. His hands kept writing and typing for another instant. Defiance is made of such little things, no matter how correct and subdued the words that followed, “I beg your pardon, sir?”

Once more Veers looked down, lightly rapping the stylus on the page to save appearances. Pity there was no way to turn off his ears.

“No, Captain, I beg your pardon, for interrupting you in such an important task that obeying my direct orders has to be delayed.”

“I apologise, sir—”

“What in the nine hells was keeping you so occupied?”

Veers held his breath.

“I was analysing the proposed attack,” Piett’s voice set out in the usual careful lack of emotion. “I’d need to feed it to the intel computers to be sure, but I think there exist a few options that would allow us to successfully rout the Rebel sympathisers on Neustria with what I estimate to be a forty-five percent reduction of civilian casualties, sir. May I have permission to go into details?”

“You have permission to jump out of an airlock.”

Polite appearances be damned, war is not a gala dinner. Veers looked up at the admiral. Ozzel wasn’t deigning his captain with anger; the only thing his expression read was a scowling annoyance with pursed lips.

Piett soldiered on, in the soothing impersonal tone you usually hear from medical droids, “I assure you, sir, such measures would not in any way decrease the efficiency of the plan—”

Ozzel waved a hand. “Do I have to run another seminar on the Tarkin Doctrine to refresh your memory, Captain?”

Glances were exchanged among the navy folks, this time. Quick and furtive, and worried.

“No, sir.”

“Suggestions borne out of sentimental scruples have no place on my watch. Is that clear?”

“It is, sir.”

 _Sentimental scruples_ , Veers mouthed. Felt like contaminated water was flowing over his lips. For a crazy instant, he wished his bleeding-heart son were here to jump to his feet and cry out those Neustrians in the forty-five percent were Imperial citizens, whom the Imperial navy existed to protect, not to blast them to dust along with the criminals. Holding no general’s rank to be demoted from, the boy could still afford a bit of brutal honesty.

“Now, if you’re done overthinking petty matters,” Ozzel cast a look around the table, “where were we, gentlemen?”

A plump-cheeked young woman with an ensign’s badge on her uniform beat everyone to the reminder. “The southern ice cap, sir.”

“Yes, of course,” said the admiral with scarcely a glance in her direction.

The southern pole of the planet’s hologram was painted in blinking I-am-a-target red. Ozzel resumed his sermon, the sharp edges of outrage smoothening in his voice as the tactical display grew into such a maze of lights that Veers had trouble reading it. Always a bit hard to see through a fog of restrained rage, all the more to study a messy map. His gaze was drawn to the captain again. 

_Shit, is he a man or a protocol droid?_

There was more life showing on Lord Vader’s mask, no joke. Veers faked a bout of coughing, smothered behind too tightly clenched a fist—just a pathetic little sign to let the universe know his anger was flaring up.

_Get mad, for stars’ sake. Don’t you have a gram of pride in you?_

Yes, the captain probably did. And he must be swallowing it whole every workday.

Veers sank back on the chair. There was little sinking to do—the chair was small for him, hard and too low at the back—and a certain spot halfway down his spine, where a shrapnel on Malastare had lodged itself a few lifesaving centimetres to the side of the vertebrae, didn’t like it.

The admiral kept talking, and the rising waters flooded twenty-three coastal cities on both hemispheres of the planet, but it was all too damn tedious to feel sorry for the Neustrians. Their bad for allowing traitors to prosper among them.

Veers forced himself to pretend he was taking notes in a free corner at the bottom of the page. Well, that was the intention. The results were two stick figures. One with a general’s rank badge, in the act of hitting the other with an uppercut to the face; this latter bore an admiral’s insignia, two tiny x’s in place of the eyes, and a moustache wider than the whole head.

Not bad for a dilettante. He took care not to smile in self-satisfaction.

At that very moment, the comlink built into the terminal in front of him beeped. He pressed the button to accept the call, deliberately forgetting to ask the admiral for permission. Everyone in his staff knew he was not to be disturbed at this meeting, unless the order came from—

“General, sir,” crackled an aide’s voice, “your presence is required on Heavy Transports Holding Bay C-9 as soon as possible. Lord Vader’s orders.”

“Did something happen?” He noticed Ozzel had fallen silent, too.

“Lord Vader didn’t say, sir.”

Fine. As good as excuse as any other. He looked up at Ozzel, who nodded with a crumpled up face as if the ventilation ducts had blown in a whiff of dead mynock.

Veers got on his numb feet, sliding the datapad under his right arm.

“Ah, you had a report to make, General, didn’t you?”

 _No, I was here because I fucking love to destroy my back and my morale in one convenient stroke._ “It will have to wait, Admiral. Good day.”

He had underestimated the damage the uncomfortable chair had done to his leg nerves. At each stride he took towards the door and past the threshold, it felt like his boots had filled up with writhing worms.

“General!”

He was the only general in the corridor. He rolled his eyes before halting and turning.

Captain Piett caught up with him. “Admiral Ozzel requested you leave your report in the conference room. He said it might be worth an evaluation, sir.”

“Might be worth…” Veers said through gritted teeth. Then a bit too loud, “It’s a bit of a mess actually. I doubt he could read anything with my scrawled notes littering the pages.”

“That is of no consequence, sir, I assure you.”

Without a word, Veers showed him the datapad, open at the final page of the report, and didn’t let go of it as Piett made to take it. The captain studied the doodles in silence; a raised eyebrow was the only change in his countenance.

“Just so I know if I should start packing up my belongings: is the admiral doing this… _evaluation_ himself?”

“Of course no. I am.” The faintest upwards quirk appeared on the captain’s lips. If Veers had to be entirely honest, it gave his cold fish face an uncanny wily air.

“Right. Very well.” Veers relinquished the hold on the datapad, and was miserably relieved to see Piett switch off the display, so the offending page couldn’t be visible. “Have a good day if you can, Captain.”

“You too, sir. And—thank you.”

Before Veers could ask thank you for what exactly, Piett saluted, turned on his heels, and marched back to the conference room, at a bit too quick a step even if Ozzel had told him to settle the matter fast.

**Author's Note:**

> Another tumblr prompt; the catch was the sentence: "who does the evaluation?"
> 
> Neustria IRL was [a Frankish kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neustria). And a proof I've overdosed on Middle Ages history.


End file.
